451 Research - Biography

Peter ffoulkes has over 20 years of diversified international experience in enterprise and high-performance computing, including positions in management, business and product strategy development, product marketing, sales and training with leading international IT companies. His most recent positions were Vice President of Marketing at Adaptive Computing, Director of Outbound Marketing at ClearSpeed Technology, Director of Marketing for High-Performance Computing at Sun Microsystems, and Director and Principal Analyst for the Worldwide Workstation Computing program at Gartner Dataquest.

Enterprise adoption of public cloud IaaS is growing, but slowlyTIP Thursday / Cloud - March, 2015Cloud budgets increased from 2013 to 2014, and 87% reported an increase from 2014 to 2015. However, from the overall IT budget perspective, spending remains relatively low in large enterprises, with 58% citing less than 5% spent on cloud.

The Converged Infrastructure Ball: May I have the next dance?TIP Thursday / Servers - December, 2014Although some kind of software-defined infrastructure is the architectural vision of the future, the underlying hardware platforms – servers, network and storage – need to be able to support the required integration and cooperate seamlessly.

For policy-based provisioning, there is a changing of the guardTIP Thursday / Servers - October, 2014The journey to the cloud, in terms of evolving internal IT infrastructure, is a long one. The majority of organizations have moved beyond standardization and consolidation, while 32%, the largest individual group, are still engaged with virtualization.

OpenStack gathers momentum: Don't blink!TIP Insight / Cloud - October, 2014The market opportunity for cloud platforms is accelerating. The clans are gathering and it is challenging to identify the contenders, let alone the potential victors. As big vendors rally around OpenStack, the game is afoot and the day is far from won.

Enterprise IT and HPC converge: common workloads, specialized datacenters - Part 1MIS Spotlight - September, 2014The differences between high-performance computing and enterprise IT are becoming less distinct, but the datacenters to support them will be more specialized. It is not clear how this will all turn out, but it is a fair bet that the days of single-density, generalist enterprise datacenters are numbered.

Is VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger really a Time Lord?TIP Thursday / Servers - September, 2014VMware's current CEO, Pat Gelsinger, 'regenerated' from the previous incumbent Paul Maritz two years ago. Gelsinger has put his stamp on that position over the past couple of years, but the story arc hasn't changed that much.

Does Microsoft have a hunting license for hypervisors this year?TIP Thursday / Servers - August, 2014With VMworld San Francisco on the immediate horizon, it seems a reasonable time to question whether the foundations of VMware's software-defined datacenter fortress are solid as a rock or potentially being eroded by waves of competitive assault.

D-Wave commercializes quantum computing: who should care, and why?MIS Impact Report - August, 2014And now for something completely different: the company has built a computation system that actually performs meaningful quantum computing and is accessible to programmers and algorithm designers, not just experimental physicists. Is D-Wave's Quantum Computer an expensive curiosity or the harbinger of interesting things to come?

Budgeting for the transition to cloud computingTIP Thursday / Cloud - August, 2014From the budget perspective, enterprise IT organizations are increasingly focusing on the transformation to cloud computing in one form or another as being the IT delivery model of the future.

Is it time for IBM to say 'Goodbye to the Machine'?TIP Thursday / Servers - July, 2014Unless IBM can achieve a dramatic turnaround in its hardware-related businesses, it might be appropriate for the company to consider a rebranding exercise to position itself as something that more closely relates to its future direction.

HP brings high-end computing, liquid cooling, to the datacenter massesMIS Impact Report - June, 2014Launched in Q2 2014, a new range of high-performance compute systems, including a new water-cooled supercomputer, mark HP's latest foray into the field of HPC. HP says the systems are applicable to enterprise deployments such as big data applications as well as traditional HPC (scientific and research use).

The OpenStack tipping point - will it go over the edge?TIP Thursday / Cloud - May, 2014For many organizations, the choice of cloud platform will be the biggest single strategic choice that enterprise customers make in the next two years, setting the directional choice for their future IT direction and investment.

Still early days for usage-based reporting and accountingTIP Thursday / Servers - April, 2014While charge-back is the obvious choice for public cloud services, the choice for private clouds is not so clear-cut. As with many things that are cloud related, cultural issues far outweigh technology concerns.

If the road to hybrid cloud is private, how do the public get access?TIP Insight / Servers - April, 2014Enterprises are continuing the journey to cloud-based architectures, but concerns of data privacy and sensitivity are causing many to consider private clouds for some workloads, leaving other categories as better opportunities for public cloud providers.

Converged infrastructure: the enterprise platform of the future?TIP Thursday / Servers - April, 2014Although initially received with skepticism by some vendors, Cisco's move into the world of x86-based 'industry standard servers' was a harbinger of change in the transformation of IT toward the software-defined datacenter and a cloudy future.